Long, long ago my wild child classmate Lorna shocked everybody by carving ELVIS into her forearm, and then grinding pencil-lead into the incisions. The grown ups may have worried about septicaemia, but I can’t remember anybody asking why 12-year-old Lorna would inflict such pain on herself.
Of my three sons, two have tattoos. Not all-over body-as-art ones, but tattoos, nonetheless, with my army son leading the way. When he rang to tell me about this new venture, I sarcastically remarked that the only way I could cope with a tattoo was that if it depicted a heart, an arrow and the message MUM. Needless to say, a guffaw greeted this remark. Predictably, the tattoo features a tribute to the special forces.
I groused and grumbled in time-honoured parental style. A shocking thing to do to your body. How did you bear the pain? What about the expense? You’re stuck with it now, you realise.
And I added, rather embarrassingly, a classist comment that really dated me. In my day the only people who had tattoos were ex-convicts and wharf labourers. I refrained from mentioning the publisher I once knew who had anchors (I think) decorating his forearms. And I certainly didn’t mention Lorna.
My comment was not only classist, but ignorant, for tattoos have a long and honourable history, being a feature of most cultures since ancient times. The well-preserved man scientists call Otzi, who was discovered in the Italian-Austrian Alps in 1991, is 5,300 years old, and has tattoos, mainly on his joints, suggesting a link between tattoos and acupuncture. The Greeks used them as a way of communicating with spies, and the Romans labelled criminals in this way. The Polynesians have always favoured tattoos, and Christian crusaders often ensured that their hands bore small crosses as requests for Christian burial should they fall in battle.
Later my attitude softened, as my youngest son acquired simple tattoos, one for each of his children. This seems to be his way of making a memorial kind of gesture to himself, because the tattoos are on his thigh, and not seen by the general public, not even at the beach, as he always wears board shorts. It’s just as well he has long legs, though, as he and his wife have recently had a third child.
'Life is, among many other things, an endless learning curve.'
Life is, among many other things, an endless learning curve. It seems to